Digital electronic records are increasingly used as proof of events. Historically, seals, signatures, special papers, and other tools were used to prove the authenticity of documents and other records. Moreover, in addition to proving the authenticity of documents and records, these and other tools have been used to prove that a document was received or produced in a certain order. These methods of proving authenticity and order are useful in a variety of fields, including banking, negotiations, legal filing, and public administration. Today, these services are typically offered by notaries, auditors, and the like.
Similar services of authentication and order verification are required in the marketplace of digitized electronic content. In a variety of fields of this marketplace, electronic service providers receive digital records. For example, an electronic banking system receives a digital record of a consumer purchase. These service providers record the sequence in which records are received, and assign each record a “sequence value.” After the record has been received and registered by the service provider, a digital certificate is typically issued to the record-providing party. The need may later arise for either the service provider or another party to verify the order in which particular records were registered. To meet this need for verification, sequence values may be bound to digital records in such a way as to later prove that the sequence values reflect the order of registration in a correct and authentic way.
Typically, this binding of sequence numbers to digital records is accomplished by asymmetric cryptography or, as an alternative method, by publishing. A verifiable binding is referred to as a an order certificate. Without verifiable bindings, service providers could deny the validity of anything that is presented as a certificate.
When asymmetric cryptography is used to make the verifiable binding, the service provider typically signs a digital record (containing a corresponding sequence value) with a digital signature or encryption scheme, such as RSA. Public key cryptography is fast enough to enable almost instantaneous certificate generation. However, there is an inherent weakness in using asymmetric cryptography to create digital signatures: Cryptographic signature keys may become compromised. Once a key has become compromised, the certificates created with that key are no longer verifiable. Since the likelihood that a key will become compromised increases over time, certificates created by using keyed cryptographic are useful only for a short term.
When publishing is used to make the verifiable binding, the service provider typically publishes a digital record together with a sequence value in a widely-witnessed manner, for example, in a newspaper. If the service provider commits to certain rules regarding publication, then the published content can be relied upon as having been certified by the service provider. Since no cryptographic keys are used in the publication method, the problem of key compromise is not a concern. However, the publication method is inefficiently slow. Publication is realistic daily or weekly, but instant certificate creation, though demanded by the modern electronic market, is impossible.
To verify the authenticity of certificate for a long term, and to do so efficiently, publishing-based bindings and/or multiple key signatures can be used in combination. However, since this combination approach has the disadvantages of both systems, certificates must be regularly updated, creating additional expense to maintain the validity of the bindings.
There is another fundamental problem related to concerns the properties of the sequence values themselves, typically represented as integers. To some extent, verifiable bindings between digital records and integers can be viewed by verifying parties as proof that the records did indeed receive these sequence values.
Often, however, the sequence numbers assigned to digital records do not accurately reflect the real temporal order in which records were received. Malicious service providers may assign sequence numbers to records in any order they so desire. Thus, a need has arisen to detect erroneous behavior of a service provider. The concept of numbering records can be too abstract to reflect the registration process. For example, an assertion that three records were registered before any one particular record does not provide any information about how the records were registered. One way to overcome this problem is to define the sequence value of a particular record as the set of all records preceding a particular record in the repository. Such “sequence values” represent the order of registering, but since they also record the history of the repository, they cannot be denied by the service provider. However, if each sequence value reflects the entire history of the repository, the values may become so large as to make their calculation and transmission impractical.
One way to confirm the history of a service provider is to include a cryptographic digest of all previously registered records in the digital certificate issued to the record-providing party. For example, a linear chain hash may be created by applying a cryptographic hash function to a concatenation of a newly-received record and the record received immediately prior to it. Such a method is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,136,646 to Haber et al. Cryptographic digests which are included in order certificates create causal, one-way relationships between the confirmations and thus can be used to verify their order without fear of erroneous behavior by the service provider, because any erroneous confirmation is detectable by a verifier examining the one-way causal hash chain. The sequence values created by such processes are shorter because of the use of cryptographic hash functions. However, verifying such values still requires a calculation of all records in the repository, and thus can consume significant processing resources. This process is further disadvantageous because it cannot be performed without interaction with the service provider.
Currently, efficient verifiable bindings are created with asymmetric cryptography. However, in a number of applications there is a need for longer-term verifiable bindings that are desirably verifiable without the use of cryptographic keys. Accordingly, a need has arisen for a digital electronic record registration system with procedures that enable clients to replace short-term, digitally-signed certificates (via asymmetric cryptographic methods) with long-term certificate proofs which are based on cryptographic digests and publishing methods.
The present invention is provided to solve these and other problems summary of the invention.